“A legacy, Maria, is not quite the same thing.
Mr. Winthrop Fowler’s perfect intonation carried
its usual implication that the subject was closed.

“——­ is what I call an adventuress,”
Miss Fowler summed up. She had a way of ignoring
objections, of reappearing beyond them like a submarine
with the ultimate and detonating answer. “And
now she wants to reopen the matter when the whole
thing’s over and done with. After three
years. Extraordinary taste.” She hitched
her black-velvet Voltaire arm-chair a little away
from the fire and spread a vast knitting-bag of Chinese
brocade over her knees. “I suppose she isn’t
satisfied; she wants more.”

“Naturally. I cannot imagine what other
reason she could have for insisting on a personal
interview,” her brother agreed, dryly. He
retired into the Transcript as a Trappist withdraws
into his vows. A chastened client of Mr. Fowler’s
once observed that a half-hour’s encounter with
him resulted in a rueful of asphyxiated topics.

Miss Maria, however, preferred disemboweling hers,
“I shouldn’t have consented,” she
snapped. “Hugh, if you would be so good
as to sit down. You are obstructing the light.
And the curtain-cord. If you could refrain from
twisting it for a few moments.”

Hugh let his long, high-shouldered figure lapse into
the window-seat. “And besides, we’re
all dying to know what she looks like,” he suggested.

“Speak for yourself, please,” said Miss
Fowler, with the vivacity of the lady who protests
too much.

“I do, I do! Good Lord! I’m
just as bad as the rest of you. All my life I’ve
been consumed to know what Uncle Hugh could have seen
in a perfectly obscure little person to make him do
what he did. There must have been something.”
His eyes travelled to a sketch in pencil of a man’s
head which hung in the shadow of the chimneypiece,
a sketch whose uncanny suggestion might have come
from the quality of the sitter or merely from a smudging
of the medium. “Everything he did always
seemed to me perfectly natural,” he went on,
as though conscious of new discovery. “Even
those years when he was knocking about the world,
hiding his address. Even when he had that fancy
that people were persecuting him. Most people
did worry him horribly.”

A glance flashed between the two middle-aged listeners.
It was a peculiar glance, full of a half-denied portent.
Then Miss Fowler’s fingers, true to their traditions,
loosened their grip on her needles and casually smoothed
out her work.